California’s campaign to provide public services to illegal immigrants did
not end with the exit of Jerry Brown. His successor, Gavin Newsom, is just
as focused as Brown in funding programs for illegal residents at the
expense of California taxpayers.
California’s budget earmarks millions of dollars annually to the One California program, which provides free legal assistance to all aliens, including those facing deportation, and makes California’s public universities easier for illegal-alien students to attend.
The Real Cost of Homelessness
In
2016, Los Angeles Mayor Gil Garcetti proclaimed, as might an emperor or king,
he would empower citizens to “transform their streets and urban
corridors into vibrant, walkable spaces that reflect the unique characteristics
of their communities.”
As of
September 2020, Los Angeles has solved its homeless problem. The approximate
60,000 homeless encamped on Los Angeles’ streets, urban corridors, parks, and
freeway underpasses vanished to be replaced by approximately 60,000 unhoused residents. Empowered by Garcetti’s hands-off the
homeless order of protection issued for “public health and safety reasons,”
these unhoused are reimagining their lives free of health
and safety regulations and taxation applicable to the housed.
Enter
Hollywood screenwriter W. Peter Iliff (Point Break,
Varsity Blues, Trump’s America.)
Iliff
is a homeowner and father with that rarest of 21st-century
qualities, common sense. Iliff’s cozy Spanish revival home is a short
walk from the Cattaraugus underpass of The Christopher Columbus
Transcontinental Highway. Several months ago, hardcore
addicts erected a palatial 35-foot by 10-foot hovel that blocked the
sidewalk and one traffic lane in the tunnel.
The
Christopher Columbus highway bisects Iliff’s neighborhood. Families living on
the south side must walk through the underpass to shop along the Robertson
Boulevard urban corridor or take their children to Raynier Park, both
of which are on the highway’s north side. One homeless man, wielding a lead
pipe, chased a father and his four-year-old boy away as he screamed he would
crush the father’s skull. Another accosted a terrified young mother walking to
the park with her baby in a stroller. They threatened motorists driving
through, filched bicycles, and burglarized homes for months as the stench from
their fetid encampment grew unbearable.
Iliff
steadily received messages from moms and nannies terrified to walk through the
tunnel. Iliff repeatedly petitioned the city councilman, Council President Herb
Wesson, Jr., and police for help. Garcetti’s order prevented police action.
Wesson, who represents a majority black and Latino council district South of
the highway, ignored them.
Serendipitously,
a homeless outreach group sued Los Angeles in federal court. The complaint
claimed the city had failed to shelter the homeless per the terms of a $1
billion Homeless Relief Bond approved by voters. The complaint also asked the
court to order Los Angeles’ removal of persons living in freeway underpasses
because of exposure to excessive heat and exhaust. U.S. District Judge David
Carter agreed. He enjoined the City of Los Angeles to move the homeless out of
the tunnels, including the Cattaraugus underpass.
Within
hours, a phalanx of homeless outreach groups with no stake in Iliff’s community
bombarded Wesson’s office with demands for the immediate removal of
the hostile architecture, i.e., boulders. Wesson tweeted the boulders were
wrong on “so many levels” and assured the outreached that he and his team were
working to remove the hostile boulders. The humanitarian outreach groups also
doxed and sent anonymous death threats to Iliff and others on the GoFundMe
list. Within hours, the city served Iliff with a notice to remove the boulders
or face felony dumping charges. A cowardly community council condemned Iliff’s
group’s action. Protestors flooded a virtual council hearing on Zoom, turning
it into something akin to the Communist Chinese Struggle Sessions used during
Mao’s Cultural Revolution to humiliate dissidents publicly. To avoid felony
charges, Iliff suffered the humiliation of begging forgiveness for his and his
neighbors’ attempt to keep their families safe.
While
speaking at Iliff’s Struggle Session, an émigré from the former Soviet Union,
now fighting for socially just outcomes ala
Karl Marx here said, “In all of these discussions the unhoused person has been
framed as some kind of intrusion or public safety hazard — he is a resident of
this neighborhood and has as much of a stake in it as anyone who owns a home
here.” Exactly where does this unhoused resident receive income
tax, property tax, and utility bills?
The
city’s overzealous coronavirus lockdown bankrupted small businesses by the
thousands while allowing big box stores to operate. The result? Los
Angeles’ reimagined urban corridors are deserted, like the streets in 28 Days. Peter Iliff, who tried
to be reasonable in a city unhinged, awaits his fate. The addicts are moving
back into the Cattaraugus underpass. All this as Garcetti, Team Wesson, the
spineless City Council, the Lilliputian Board of County Supervisors, and their Pravda, the Los Angeles Times, are at work reimagining law
enforcement.
Mayor
Garcetti and Councilman Wesson could have fought the State Courts order without
incurring political damage. Neighboring cities do not allow fetid homeless
encampments to proliferate. Old rail cars could have been converted to
individual shelters and kept on railroad sidings. I suspect the socialists
running this city have perpetuated the homeless epidemic to further divide Los
Angeles citizens. As Saul Alinsky’s Rules
for Radicals Rule #3 states,
“Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy. Here you want to
cause confusion, fear, and retreat.” With the housed, the unhoused, and
the unhinged, at odds, madness rules the day. The only rational thing left to
do is “Pray for Surf.”
Image: Pixabay
Presidential Debates Ignore ‘2000-Lb Elephant’ of Immigration
The first Presidential debate and the Vice Presidential debates avoided any mention of the hot-button, trillion-dollar immigration issue that got Donald Trump elected in 2016.
“I’m consistently surprised about the lack of focus on immigration in these debates given Trump’s pitch in 2016,” tweeted Ali Vitali, an NBC reporter.
“Me too!” responded Julia Ainsley, who covers migrants’ issues for NBC. “Would have liked to hear more on Biden’s border plans and Pence’s response to recent reporting on family separation. Trump/Pence should be asked if they would ever separate migrant families again.”
“Agreed!” responded Michael Shear, a White House reporter for the New York Times, who sometimes writes about immigration issues.
The issue is not getting time in the debates because “the question isn’t being asked,” said Kevin Lynn, founder of U.S. Tech Workers. “The questions are being created without input from either of the parties, so it’s really the media and the entities that are putting on the debate that are not talking about immigration.”
“They really should have brought it up because [Trump’s] immigration policy is impacting wages in a positive way,” he added.
“It’s the 2000-lb elephant in the room that’s been egregiously omitted even though this is what got Trump elected,” said an experienced and unemployed network engineer from the Midwest. He continued:
I’m not holding my breath … The moderators get to pick the questions all by themselves, and they’re clearly going to show bias. They’re totally pretending like its not an issue — even with this horrible labor market when there’s still so many foreign workers here.
“I have long past hit the point of accepting that a presidential debate is not going to have the candidates discuss immigration,” tweeted Dara Lind, a former Vox.com writer who is now working at ProPublica.org. She continued:
Or if it does, it will ask a question in such a broad way that it can be answered with the candidate’s single canned talking point on immigration.
This was true in 2016, when Trump was running on immigration far more than he is now.
…
I’m sick of specifics being asked on other policy issues, and immigration being treated as a culture war issue instead of a policy one.
The Vice Presidential debate moderator was Susan Page, the Washington bureau chief for USA Today, which has a pro-migration, pro-business skew.
Page asked about climate change, the coronavirus crash, abortion, President Donald Trump’s willingness to leave office after a defeat, and other questions from an establishment, corporatist perspective. But she did not ask about the public’s preference that employers hire Americans before importing migrants, or the impact of immigration on wages, or the Democrats’ promise to import more immigrants, visa-workers, and refugees, or the GOP’s preference for skilled workers over unskilled migration.
Trump’s campaign is not pressuring the issue in 2020 as it did in 2016, said Jessica Vaughan, policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies. Trump’s “campaign staff seemed to fear offending people,” she said, adding:
But they’re separate from the actual immigration agency officials who understand the issue and how it resonates with Americans. There’s some disconnect there between those in the Trump administration who understand how important this issue is to Americans — and who want to see Trump carry on what he has started with respect to controlling immigration — [versus] the campaign staffers whose goal seems to be to avoid offending anyone, and by doing so, squandering an opportunity to attract support for the president.
“Trump has a lot to talk about, and it’s good,” said Lynn. “When you look at what he did with the Tennessee Valley Authority [workers], and when you look at the H-1B rules that were launched this week … that are going to save America jobs and that are going to save job opportunities for Americans,” he said.
“This is why I believe there’s no mention of it — Immigration is what Trump won on in 2016,” he said, adding:
The Democratic party– the party of labor — is scared to talk about immigration because with so many Americans, either furloughed, unemployed, or underemployed, they know how the public would react to the [Democrats’] concept of open borders. And as our country faces an economic crisis like we have now, and people are not optimistic about the future, they naturally will become more insular when it comes to immigration. So that’s why the Democrats don’t want it mentioned.
Joe Biden signals a 2021 welcome for Venezuelan & Cuban migrants.
Kinda like opening a window in a submarine.
The cost of progressives' vanity is imposed on poorer Americans who lose wages & homes. https://t.co/ngfEykNYqE— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) October 8, 2020
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